A partnership with Picasso

WILLIAMSTOWN - At the start of the new Pablo Picasso exhibit at the Clark Art Institute, visitors are greeted by the artist himself.

He stares, gaunt and ghostly. Blue in complexion, blue in mood. And perhaps most significantly, alone.

Painted in 1901, it could be Picasso’s most famous self-portrait, and it’s an excellent starting point for the exhibit, not just because it introduces us to the man, but also because it reinforces that popular notion of the brilliant, eccentric artist who toils alone.

Was Picasso a solitary artistic genius? Yes. But that’s only part of the picture, says Clarke. “Who are the unsung heroes behind his work?” she asks. “Who are the printers, art dealers, wives and children who supported him throughout his career?”

Picasso as collaborator: It’s a portrait he never painted.

If you want to catch a glimpse of how he interacted with others in the creation of his art, there’s no better place to look than his prints. “Picasso: Encounters” draws together 35 large-scale prints from private and public collections, including the Musee Picasso in Paris.

The Clark owns only two pieces by Picasso, but one of them, “The Frugal Repast” (1904), served as inspiration for the exhibit.

The print offers an unglamorous view of the bohemian life that Picasso knew so well in his early years. The man and woman in the portrait are beyond thin – they’re almost skeletal – with a humble meal of wine and bread on the table before them.

“It’s an amazing piece, but it had no friends to play with,” says Clarke, describing the portrait, which represents one of Picasso’s first attempts at large-scale printmaking. “So I started to think about bringing in works to play in concert with it.”

Picasso didn’t always play well with others. But printmaking is by nature a collaborative art form. The artist of course creates the image, but typically a printer is brought in for the more technical process of producing the actual prints. The two roles can sometimes bleed together.

Eugene Delatre, an artist and printer who was known to insinuate his own creative touches into the creation of a print, reproduced “The Frugal Repast” for Picasso. He took some artistic liberties that may have upset the artist; Picasso didn’t use Delatre as his printer when “Frugal Repast” was later reissued.

Tempestuous interactions were at the heart of much of Picasso’s work, including the combustible relationships he often forged with the wives and lovers who so frequently served as his muses. At times, his attitude toward these women seemed to border on misogyny, and yet he was so desperate for their company that he always needed to be involved with a wife, lover, or both.

“There are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats,” Picasso once said.

Although he was wrong on both accounts, there’s no denying that there’s rapture in “Jacqueline Knitting” (1954), a portrait of Picasso’s second wife and final muse, Jacqueline Roque.

With her long, elegant nose, angled eyes, high forehead and powerful mane of hair, Roque looked like a Picasso portrait in the flesh. Her profile in the piece is exotic, her hooded eyes gazing down at the twining of her knitting needles. The viewers’ eyes wander to all the geometric forms woven into the design, Picasso’s Cubist fingerprint.

There’s affection, too, in Picasso’s print portrait of his daughter Paloma. She is cherubic and doll-like.

“It’s a very sympathetic image,” says Clarke. “It’s very kind and very calm.”

“Calm” isn’t an adjective often used to describe the way Picasso rendered his subjects, and that’s certainly the case with “The Weeping Woman” (1937). It’s a tortured and disturbing image that harkens back to the discord of some of his iconic paintings. The woman wails, shedding spiked tears that dig troughs in her cheeks.

The exhibit is dominated by black, white and gray, so you appreciate the bursts of color that come with the three paintings on display. And more color awaits at the end of the exhibit, where we get another look at Picasso the collaborator, as he and printer Hidalgo Arnera create the “reduction linocut,” a streamlined process of color printing that suited the temperament of the impatient Picasso.

It’s Clarke’s big takeaway from the exhibit.

“I was just surprised by his level of collaboration with his printers,” says Clarke, who worked on the exhibit for about a year. “I thought Picasso would be kind of the boss-man. But I think he enjoyed the back and forth with the printers. In some cases, it was a real creative collaboration.”

Clarke observes that there’s something accessible and democratic about prints; their relative affordability brought Picasso’s work to a new class of people.

“Early on, he wasn’t as interested in printmaking, he was just a starving artist trying to get by,” says Clarke. “But later on, he definitely became interested in getting his work out there. He saw printmaking as a way to disseminate his reputation.”

Picasso’s reputation as an artist hardly needs bolstering these days, but his prints have been disseminated to a far-flung corner of Massachusetts just the same. “Picasso: Encounters” is another piece of the Picasso puzzle, and it’s a welcome and worthy stop for anyone making a trip to the Berkshires this summer.

Alexander Stevens is a freelance writer. Follow us on Twitter @WickedLocalArts or on Facebook.

“Picasso: Encounters”

WHEN: Through Aug. 27

WHERE: The Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown

HOURS: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; open daily in July and August

ADMISSION: $20

INFO: 413-458-2303; www.clarkart.edu

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